The book you need to read on bin Laden's life post-2001

There is no shortage of books on the September 11 attacks and their aftermath. Some stand back to analyse it in terms of trends and networks, seeking to explain the 'why' through abstractions. Others have written participant accounts or their histories from the sidelines. The Exile offers a fulsome corrective to this trend towards abstraction. Curious what life was like for bin Laden, his commanders and their families? Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy deliver in spades.

The beating heart of this book are the stories of bin Laden's wives, their children and their life in 'exile'. The authors seem to have managed to achieve as yet unparalleled access to the wives and some other family members of Osama bin Laden, and their tale is both gripping and believable. The second important contribution that the book makes is to reveal Iran's role in hosting the bin Laden families (and commanders) post-2001. The rich detail goes a long way to giving the reader a sense of the day-to-day frustrations of their lives in Tehran (and other places) as well as their interactions with Iranian military and government officials. The book would be worth its price just for these sections alone.

Chapter Eleven tells the story of the night bin Laden died, to a large extent from the perspective of his wives and family members. They also weave in accounts from US soldiers participating in the raid, but this is a perspective we have been denied till now and I think it is an important one. Indeed, the trauma faced by the children on that night (and throughout the years prior, for the most part unable to leave their home) is one of the understated but crucial themes that stand out from 'The Exile'.

Every account of bin Laden's time post-2001 has to grapple with the question of Pakistan's role. The authors take a smart position throughout the book, which is to abstain from abstraction and a strong analytic voice. There are some claims of Pakistani ISI involvement and meetings here and there, but they step back a little before charging the government or senior officials with a state-level conspiracy. Whatever happened, this account holds, was much more an affair of bit players.

The book had the feeling of being rushed to press. It must have cost a lot to research the book, so perhaps the authors simply ran out of funds, but it seemed like there were so many other lines of enquiry that could have been started. The hardcover copy I read still had a fairly large number of typos, and it's a shame that the authors use the word "Afghanis" to refer to Afghans.

The book is extremely readable -- it kept me up until two in the morning as I finished it -- and this is in large part because of the use of dialogue and building up narrative tension through conversations. Unfortunately, the handling of some of these conversations -- reported through interviews with participants -- strains credulity. Study of memory and oral history has shown how these kinds of memories degrade or get reshaped with each telling, and I wish there were more caveats throughout the book that what we're reading is an approximation of what happened in order to better imaginatively enter the situation.

All in all, though, The Exile is an important book, an engrossing read and hopefully the beginning of more enquiries as others follow up on leads and side-stories raised in the telling. I took copious notes and will be digesting its various contents for a while, I think. It seems that scholars of September 11 and its aftermath are doomed to eternally reading and retelling the same events in slightly different contortions as new facts and witnesses emerge. If all the books were as good as this one, I wouldn't mind so so much.

Robert Caro's Big Long Book

One million words. More.

The Power Broker is the kind of book you see in a bookshop, pick it up, put it back down again because its weight is a physical assault on your wrist.

It isn't available as a digital edition for Kindle, so you're stuck with lugging the physical copy around with you. I started this book in February, setting up a Beeminder goal to keep me on track. The pages are large and the type small, so even a goal of reading twenty pages a day took 30-45 minutes.

I persevered, despite some weeks where I was travelling and therefore separated from the 1.3 kilogramme tome.

It was worth it. At over a million words, Caro obviously has the space to include a good deal of detail.

Robert Moses, if you're still reading by this point, is the subject of this biography. Moses worked in city planning, transportation and huge building projects in the New York state area (and some other big ones elsewhere in the United States). Caro's book details his life story, showing how Moses' drive 'got things done' in and around the city. Whether it was building roads or huge buildings, Moses was a force to be reckoned with in political as well as administrative terms.

Caro approaches his subject from a number of different perspectives. He appears to have read a huge amount of the raw primary source material in the public domain as well as interviewed 522 individuals close to or involved in Moses' work. That he managed to keep the book so readable is almost a miracle in and of itself. Every page draws you in, details and stories and glimpses that make Moses and the times in which he live come to life.

There are so many amazing details and sections to this book that picking any one would detract from the whole. If you have the time (and the stamina), give this book a read, even if you have no prior interest in urban planning. Highly recommended.

How We Forget

“How naive he’d been, thought the optician, how naive. Because there would always be greater sorrow, deeper and more unfathomable than any of us could ever imagine.” (p. 83)

Bad things happen all the time. Suffering is a feature of life for many people. When this suffering happens on our doorstep, an initial flurry of interest is followed by a long steady wane as what was the extraordinary becomes routine. So it is with the boatloads of people making their way towards Europe. For a brief moment, Europe seemed to care. The passage of time saw even these tragic stories become absorbed into the fabric of ‘normal life’.

Emma Jane Kirby’s book, The Optician of Lampedusa hits the pause button on our collective forgetting. This is an Italian optician’s story, a short tale of his coming into contact with the raw human tragedy occurring with regularity on Europe’s southern shores. The optician is sailing with friends when he comes across hundreds of drowning Eritreans (among others). The book chronicles the moments before, during and after their rescue.

Kirby’s strength is to stick to detailed observations, relaying what was going through the Italian optician’s mind, what he was seeing and hearing. It (re)connects the reader with the unvarnished reality of those being smuggled into Europe. It’s a unique account in its directness, and was a sober reminder of something that I had started to forget.

If I have one criticism of the book, it is the perspective. I would far rather have read a book by one of the survivors, or at least to hear the story in their words. I understand that European publishers feel like they need a white face to relay the stories of ‘the other’, I just wish it wasn’t the case. Nevertheless, this was a sensitively written account and one I will be recommending to friends and family.

Syria’s Revolution: The First Draft

I haven’t been following events in Syria that closely. ‘Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War’ (by Robin Yassin-Kassab, Leila Al-Shami) is only one among several books that have been written in the midst of the ongoing conflict, but I’d heard consistently good things about it since its release at the beginning of 2016. It doesn’t disappoint. I started it yesterday, lulled by the conclusion of a large project and a thousand pictures of Christmas dinner preparations on twitter. I woke up this morning and finished the rest.

Burning Country is compellingly written, not only on a structural level but also on account of its interspersed interview and other oral history-type testimony. This is the book’s primary strength, I felt. It’s hard enough to write accurate and compelling history after the fact. Doing so while events are still unfolding makes the job even harder. Thankfully, Burning Country delivers the goods.

After introducing Syria and Syrians as if to set the stage, Yassin-Kassab and al-Shami launch into an account of the Syrian uprising’s early days, told through a diversity of sources from a variety of backgrounds. They make a strong case for the initial moments of the revolution as being less co-opted by one group or another, even as later chapters show how a variety of forces pushed and pulled that initial impulse in unintended directions. I learnt a lot from the accounts of initial organisational strategies, the way different groups responded to similar kinds of threats from the state and how the logic of violent escalation started to take on more prominence. The chapter on cultural shifts (or expressions) brought about by the revolution (chapter eight) was also excellent. The end of the book falls a little short, if only because the conflict is ongoing and you had the sense that it is an unfinished project.

As a one-stop shop introduction and opening-out to some important parts of Syrian society, history and current affairs, Burning Country is well worth your time. The book ends with a note on thinking about and understanding Syria:

“In order to truly think globally – rather than to hide from thought behind clumsy globalising paradigms – it is necessary to act locally. We ask the reader, rather than applying the usual grand narratives, to attend to voices from the ground.”

I hope we get to read other histories of Syria (and other countries) that employ the same logic.

The Best Books I Read in 2016

Compared to 2015, this year was a relatively slow year. I decided to reduce the number of books that I wanted to read after it became clear to me just how much work I’d have to put in to finish my PhD dissertation.

Last year I wrote that I wanted half of the books I read in 2016 to be fiction. I also said that I didn’t want to buy any new books. I failed firmly and thoroughly on both goals. I only read nine works of fiction this year, and I bought many books. Part of the reason for less fiction was due to a realignment of my broader goals (less writing of fiction in my daily life and more writing of computer/programming code). Nevertheless, I want to be reading more fiction as a regular habit. I’ll probably set a Beeminder goal for 2017 to facilitate this.

Two works of fiction did stand out among the 76 (as of today) books I did manage to read. Hanya Yanagihara’s ‘A Little Life’ was an unrelentingly miserable book. At 734 pages, it was also very long. It was a significant time investment, but the craft of the writing kept me reading. I avoided reading reviews when this came out, but was aware that many people were saying positive things. The events that take place in this book are traumatic, to say the least, and the author has been criticised for writing ‘torture porn’ by a number of readers. So take this or leave it. It’s incredibly powerful and beautifully written.

2016 was also my year to jump on the Elena Ferrante bandwagon. I read the first two volumes in a series of four. I enjoyed the first, ‘My Brilliant Friend’, more than the second, though that was perhaps on account of the pleasure on discovering a new writer (to me) who told engaging and emotionally satisfying stories. This book didn’t send me on a nostalgia-infused journey as it seems to have done with others, but it was certainly one of the books I savoured reading most this year. “Deliciously compelling,” I wrote immediately after finishing.

Cal Newport’s Deep Work was what spurred me to finish my PhD in an intense three-month period at the beginning of the year. I think anyone doing some kind of freelance work, or remote work, or work where you aren’t immediately / directly under the supervision of someone else would benefit from reading this book. Newport is occasionally a bit preachy, but don’t let that distract you from his important thoughts on quality of work and production. (Some related thoughts in an old blogpost here.)

Austin Kleon’s ‘Show Your Work’ (original blog here) is responsible for the uptick in posts on this blog. (I even have a Beeminder goal to keep me honest.) This was a quick but rich overview of ways in which sharing ideas, work and other moments where you learn something can be useful for both the author and his audience. Lots of practical ideas, most of which could be boiled down to what happens when you keep a blog regularly updated. Highly recommended to anyone who thinks for a living.

‘The Inner Game of Tennis’ by W. Timothy Gallwey is my final pick, if only because I really need to absorb some of its lessons. Gallwey makes the point that conflict between competing ‘voices’ in our minds is often the source of self-sabotage. I wrote a longer summary here in case you want to learn more.

The year is 97% finished, and arbitrary as the passing of time is, I remain mindful of the fact that there aren’t that many days. I also have been trying to hold the paradox of things mattering (but at the same time not mattering) in my head.

So 2017: more fiction, (probably) more blogging, (certainly) more coding and maybe a return to Afghanistan-related topics.

Reading and the American Revolution

‘A Powerful Mind: The Self-Education of George Washington’ tells the story of Washington’s reading habits (and how they benefited him). You can read only the introduction and get the main message: he read a lot and the things he read allowed him to grow as a military and political leader. The rest of the book is a detailed exploration of this thesis alongside some of the supporting evidence.

Extensive and deep reading alike were important throughout his career. In one of the most fascinating sub-sections, Harrison shows how Washington’s military campaign benefited from some of the latest military theories of the day, both in terms of tactics and strategy.

I benefited from the way the book proceeded chronologically through Washington’s life, not being familiar (at all) with the events of the American Revolution and the time period being examined. One of my first questions to other readers (over on Goodreads) was the extent to which someone not immersed in this American history could read this book without trouble, and I’m pleased to report that relative newbies like myself shouldn’t find much issue.

This book is repurposed from a PhD thesis, and it tells. The narrative is sometimes diverted to a discussion of sources or the evidence on which certain claims rest. This is all fine and proper, though it disrupts the flow. I wonder whether those discussions might not have been relegated to an appendix. That said, I also occasionally felt that too much was made out of the baseline evidence on which the book seems to rest, i.e. the records of which books were owned, annotated and/or read by Washington. Harrison writes a lot about the various ways we can deduce what Washington might have been reading at period X or Y, but as a reader myself I felt disappointed that somehow we hardly ever seemed to actually catch Washington directly in the act.

One of the points that I found most interesting was how Washington seemed to go about selecting his books. There were fewer titles at the time, so he seemed to have more opportunity or necessity for deep reading (annotating copies line-by-line, for example) than in the present day where it’s probably easier to develop habits of wide/extensive reading that are ultimately shallow. A fascinating section in this respect was where Washington decides he needs to overhaul his farm and agricultural practices, and Harrison shows how he used what he read to take a risky but ultimately profitable decision to reform and overhaul how he managed his land.

Highlights + DevonThink = Pretty Great

I’m late to the Highlights party, but I’m glad I got here.

Like many readers of this blog, I get sent (and occasionally read) a lot of PDFs. In fact, I did a quick search in DevonThink, and I am informed that I have 52,244 PDFs in my library. These are a mix of reports, archived copies of websites, scanned-and-OCRed photos and a thousand-and-one things in between.

Thus far, my workflow has been to read PDFs on my Mac. Any notes I took while reading the file were written up manually in separate files. I would laboriously copy and paste whatever text snippet or quotation I wanted to preserve along with its page reference. These would be fed into DevonThink’s AI engine and magic would happen.

Now, post-Highlights-installation, my workflow is much less laborious. I can take highlights in-app, export all the quotations as separate text or HTML files and have have DevonThink go do its thing without all the intermediary hassle. If you’re  a professional researcher or writer using DevonThink as your notes database — and quite frankly, if not, why not? — the Highlights app will probably please you.